The night before the day that would make him famous, James E. Hansen listened to a baseball game on the radio. But his mind kept wandering: What would he say to Congress the next day to convey that humans were endangering the planet?
He had long been trying to raise the alarm without success, and
so had other scientists. But then, on June 23, 1988 — 30 years ago Saturday — a Colorado senator named Tim Wirth convened yet another hearing on the topic. Dr. Hansen was one of several scientists on the witness list.
Few people had ever heard of him, nor of the obscure NASA unit that he headed. He and a small group of colleagues studied the Earth’s climate, working in a suite of offices above the
Manhattan diner that “Seinfeld” would later make famous.
He had conducted rigorous studies of historical temperatures, concluding that the planet was warming sharply. He had helped to pioneer computer modeling of the climate, and the results predicted further warming if people kept pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
One of Dr. Hansen’s scenarios, Scenario B, has turned out to be a reasonably close match for fossil-fuel emissions as they actually occurred. Yet we now know Scenario B predicted too much global warming, by
something like 30 percent.
Two reasons for that stand out. One is that Dr. Hansen had assumed a continued increase in certain refrigerant gases that warm the climate. Those gases were ultimately brought under control by a global treaty, the
Montreal Protocol — proof that scientific warnings, if taken seriously, can be acted upon at a worldwide scale.
The bigger problem was that the computers he was using in the 1980s could not operate fast enough to give a realistic picture of the upper atmosphere; as a result, his model was most likely overestimating the Earth’s sensitivity to emissions. In the years since, computer modeling of the climate, though hardly perfect, has improved.
So while his temperature forecast was not flawless, in a larger sense, Dr. Hansen’s 1988 warning has turned out to be entirely on target. As emissions have soared, the planet has warmed relentlessly, just as he said it would; 1988 is not even in the top 20 warmest years now. Every year of this century has been hotter.
The ocean is rising, as Dr. Hansen predicted, and the pace seems to be accelerating. The great ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are
dumping ever-rising volumes of water into the sea. Coastal flooding is
increasing rapidly in the United States. The Arctic Ocean ice cap has shrunk drastically.
If his warning in 1988 had been met with a national policy to reduce emissions, other countries might have followed, and the world would be in much better shape.
But within a few years after he raised the alarm, fossil-fuel interests and libertarian ideologues began financing a campaign of lies about climate research. The issue bogged down in Congress, and to this day that body has taken no action remotely commensurate with the threat.
Dr. Hansen retired from NASA in 2013, but at age 77, he feels his work is not done. Today, from an office at Columbia University, he spends his time fighting the government he once served. He is an expert witness for a
lawsuit that young people have filed in Oregon against the federal government, contending that its failure to tackle climate change is a threat to their constitutional rights of life and liberty.
His granddaughter,
Sophie Kivlehan, is one of the plaintiffs in the case, which has
gotten much farther than many legal experts thought it would. The case may go to trial later this year.
Prophets of impending calamity are rarely thanked for their efforts, especially when they turn out to be right. But Dr. Hansen did receive a form of thanks recently, sharing half a of a $1.3 million
prize for his attempts to warn the public about the risks of climate change.
The congressional failure to respond to his warning might be seen now as a harbinger of the political crisis that has since engulfed the United States. How can Congress tackle global warming if it lacks the capacity to solve far smaller problems?
Lately, Dr. Hansen has been thinking about the connection between the political crisis and the climate crisis. He is a strong proponent of a new system of voting, called
ranked choice, that has been adopted in many other countries and a few parts of the United States, with the goal of recreating a political center.
“It’s very hard to see us fixing the climate,” Dr. Hansen said, “until we fix our democracy.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/23/opinion/sunday/james-e-hansen-climate-global-warming.html
